Our goals
ESP Wiki is a wiki, editable by anyone, which aims to build an information resource for campaigns against software patents around the world.
How do we "end software patents"?
What we can do right now in a given region depends on current events there, but in the long term we have to work toward four goals:
- Legislation that clearly excludes software ideas from patentability
- Patent office conduct that consistently rejects applications for patents on software ideas
- Court rulings which confirm that patents on software ideas are not valid
- Understanding among politicians that software patents are a bad idea
The role of en.swpat.org
To achieve these goals, we have to develop solid arguments and legal wordings for how to describe the limits of patentability in a way that puts software ideas clearly outside of the scope.
There have been many great campaigns organised around the world and most of the information they gathered is relevant in other countries. For example, if market analysts in the Netherlands publish a report saying that software patents are bad for innovation, then that report is useful in many countries, not just the Netherlands. With that in mind, swpat.org's role is to make all the great info from the many campaigns accessible to each other campaign. This means we can all build on the status quo instead of each starting from zero.
Like software, anti-swpat info is developed incrementally.
Related pages on ESP Wiki
- Why focus only on software
- Webpages that disappeared - to see why we're doing this documentation project
- Links to be processed
- Ideas for info to gather
- Please help find these documents
- Talk:Discuss this wiki
- Finding things on en.swpat.org
- Category:En.swpat.org
- There's a sandbox page for test edits
